Marcotte wants more transparency with county’s ‘small’ contracts

Westchester County Legislator Sheila Marcotte, a Republican from Tuckahoe, is calling for a law aimed at shedding more light on county contracts, especially those small ones that add up to big bucks.

Marcotte wants the Board of Legislators to adopt a law that would require that all proposed short-form contracts – those that are $20,000 or less and signed off by department heads—be published on the board’s website with relevant documentation about who is being paid and for what service. Last year, they totaled roughly $6 million, she said.

It’s all about transparency and vetting agencies, she said this afternoon.

“In the spirit of open government and (knowing) where does the money go, let’s put them on the web,” she said, adding that there seems to be no process in place of vetting particular non-profits and other vendors.

In the board’s case, many of these relatively small agreements are provided for as part of the Westchester County budget and are disguised in budget lines with “warm and fuzzy names” such as ‘community services’ or ‘environment and energy’ and are approved by the budget & appropriations committee as well as the board, according to Marcotte.

The first-term legislator said she first learned of the process during budget season in December when $1.3 million in contracts for non-profits — in what Republicans dubbed as pork — were added to the budget by board Democrats with little or no discussion.

The only way to learn about the details of these contracts is to file requests through the Freedom of Information Law, which she said is unreasonably complicated and slow.

It’s all about letting taxpayers know where their money is being spent, she said.